Page 13 of Small Town Hero

A fter several hours spent searching through bags and boxes in the storage unit where Becky and Ellie’s things were stashed, and being bitten by numerous mosquitos, Susannah finally struck it lucky.

Becky’s notebooks, tattered and stained and bent, were stuffed into plastic shopping bags at the bottom of a tilting cardboard cube draped in cobwebs.

Susannah had seen the box before, taped shut and obviously long forgotten, jammed into the dusty space under the basement steps at her sister’s rented house.

She hadn’t looked inside at the time; in fact, she’d almost left the thing behind.

Alas, after going through practically everything her sister and niece owned, the box had represented one last, flimsy hope that Becky’s journals still existed. The chances were pretty high, after all, that she’d thrown them away or burned them to ashes long ago.

Ellie, worn out by nearly two hours of effort, now occupied a rusty-legged, sagging lawn chair near the raised door of the unit. She was scrolling through photographs on her phone.

Susannah let out a low cry of “ Yes! ” when, after digging through layers of rusted wire coat hangers, old newspapers, and T-shirts-turned-rags, she found the first supermarket bag and opened it.

There were at least a dozen small notebooks inside, multicolored, with faded covers and thumb-worn edges. The handwriting inside the first one she opened was definitely Becky’s, though the paper was stained and the pencil lines barely visible.

She promptly decided to decipher the entries later, at home.

“What?” Ellie asked anxiously, bolting to her feet. “What happened?”

“I think I found them,” Susannah replied, flipping through a second journal without registering the lines written inside. Again, the style, though childish, with its rounded, loopy letters and tiny circles dotting the i ’s, was Becky’s. “Your mom’s notebooks, I mean.”

“Wow,” Ellie breathed. She was very tired—it was late, and she was just a kid—but the find had clearly shocked her back to wide-eyed alertness. “Do—do you think we should read them? Without asking Mom, I mean?”

“Under any other circumstances,” Susannah answered quietly, “reading them would definitely be wrong. Journals and diaries are meant to be private. But this is a unique situation—a possible clue to what happened to your mom that set off her mental illness, way back when she was only a year older than you are now.” She paused, fought back a sudden and unexpected rush of tears—tears of hope, tears of relief, tears of sorrow, because Becky’s illness had all but ruined her life, and Ellie’s, too.

“Whatever it was, it’s been causing her problems ever since, Ellie, and if there’s something in these notebooks that explains things, we need to find it. ”

“And then what?” Ellie asked, sounding uncertain. Undoubtedly, Becky had warned her that the journals were strictly off-limits.

“And then we share the information with Becky’s doctors. They’ll almost surely be able to use it to help her get better—for real.”

There might be reason to involve the police, too, though Susannah didn’t mention that. Ellie’s mother was in a mental hospital; the girl had enough to worry about without adding extra layers.

“What if it doesn’t help? What if it makes things even worse ?” The poor child sounded frantic now. In her desperate efforts to keep her secret, Becky had clearly done more damage than she could possibly have realized.

Not that Susannah held any grudges against her sister. Whatever had shattered Becky so completely had to be beyond horrendous.

With that in mind, Susannah set aside the two bags she’d found, crossed the concrete floor of the storage unit, and took Ellie into her arms.

The girl began to cry, and it was heartbreaking to hear.

“Let’s go home,” Susannah told her gently, when she’d rocked her niece back and forth in her embrace for a minute or so. “Nico will be waiting for you. And you need some sleep.”

“Is everything going to be all right?” Ellie asked, and the question was almost a plea.

Susannah gave her one last squeeze. “Truthfully, I can’t promise that, sweetheart, because life is pretty darned unpredictable, but I give you my word that I’ll do everything I possibly can to see that things turn out for the best. Fair enough?”

Ellie sniffled, rested her forehead against Susannah’s shoulder for a few moments. “Fair enough,” she agreed. “I love you, Aunt Susannah.”

Susannah’s throat thickened so that she could barely croak out a reply. “And I love you, Eleanor Louise Bennet.”

Ten minutes later, they were home again.

Ellie gathered a meowing Nico into her arms and retreated to her room to put on her pajamas. After brushing her teeth in the bathroom, which was under reconstruction and therefore awkward to use, she joined Susannah at the kitchen table.

With a glass of wine close at hand, Susannah was sorting through the notebooks, trying to put them in chronological order, though that seemed like a losing battle, since neither the journals nor the entries were dated.

At that point, she was going mostly by the stages of Becky’s handwriting development, ranging from large, loopy, childlike letters to a tighter, plainer stream of words.

In all, there were twenty-two makeshift diaries, all filled with Becky’s thoughts, experiences, hopes and fears. Partly because she’d used pencils much of the time, rather than pens, large patches of many entries were smeared or even entirely obliterated.

“You’re starting now?” Ellie asked, fetching Nico’s box of treats from a shelf and shaking a few into her palm as the cat wound himself around her ankles and purred. She dropped the kibble-like pieces to the floor, and Nico began to crunch away on his midnight snack.

Before Susannah could reply, Ellie took a glance at the clock on the stove and continued. “It’s super late. You should get some sleep.”

“I know,” Susannah answered, one hand resting on the notebook she intended to read first. It would be a little like translating ancient hieroglyphs, she thought wearily, feeling more than a little discouraged.

Or some recently discovered version of the Rosetta stone.

“I promise I won’t stay up too much longer. ”

Ellie looked benignly skeptical. “Okay,” she agreed, with scant conviction.

Once both Ellie and Nico had retreated from the kitchen, Susannah fortified her determination with a sip of wine and picked up one of the oldest notebooks.

She gleaned very little from the first one. It contained accounts of incidents at school, descriptions of boys she liked and girls she didn’t , but nothing that would indicate the kind of trauma Becky must have endured.

The process was profoundly frustrating.

Exhausted but determined, Susannah perused notebook after notebook, setting a stack of them aside, since nothing in them had caught her attention.

At one fifteen in the morning, her vision began to blur.

She swallowed the last of her wine, rinsed out the glass at the sink, and set it in the drainer to dry. She’d purchased a dishwasher for the place, but hadn’t installed it yet.

In the bathroom, she cleansed her face, applied moisturizer, and brushed her teeth.

Too tired to bother with pajamas or a nightgown, Susannah removed her bra and khaki shorts and crawled into bed in her T-shirt and panties.

She was asleep in moments, and soon she was dreaming.

Normally, Susannah’s dreams were fleeting and meaningless, like black-and-white movie scenes on fast-forward.

That night, perhaps because she was extra tired and had a lot on her mind, they were so vivid, so lucid that she might have been wide-awake, acting out some hectic drama on the stage of her mind.

Suddenly, a much younger Becky appeared before her, bursting out of the nearby woods, running toward her, screaming frantically, “Run, Susannah! Run!”

Susannah ran toward a building she instantly recognized as the lake house their parents leased every summer. Unlike the family home in suburban Chicago, this cottage was small, with a lawn sloping down to the shore, and it was nearly surrounded by thick foliage and a variety of trees.

“Run!” the vision-Becky screeched again. “Get inside, Susannah— now! ”

A jolt of pure terror rocketed through Susannah’s mind’s-eye self, and she stumbled forward, toward the front door of the cottage, desperate to reach it and the safety within.

The fear ratcheted to such a height that Susannah was suddenly thrust out of the nightmare at high speed, like a stone from a slingshot. In the next moment, however, her trajectory had reversed, and she was falling and falling.

She landed hard in the waking world, with an actual impact, her skin soaked in perspiration, her breathing fast and shallow, her head so light that everything spun around her. She might have had vertigo.

“What the—?” Susannah managed to gasp, struggling to sit up. Failing.

She was still trying to restore her equilibrium when Nico zoomed into the room, like a furry streak, hurtling through the air and landing in the middle of her torso with a visceral thunk.

“ Meow?? ” the cat inquired, as though demanding an explanation.

As her heartbeat began to slow down, Susannah stroked Nico’s silken back.

He progressed from her stomach to her chest and began kneading insistently at her T-shirt. “ Meow? ” he repeated.

“Everything’s okay, buddy,” Susannah managed to assure him, after a few more unstable moments. “It was just a dream.”

Just a dream.

But was it? The experience had felt so real, more like a memory than a random night-play of the mind.

A shiver went through Susannah, recalling the desperation, the frantic terror, in Becky’s voice and facial expression.

Search though she did, Susannah could find no recollection of such an incident, yet the reality of it dogged her so strongly that she gently moved Nico aside, got out of bed, and put her shorts back on.

Semi-dressed, she headed for the kitchen, but this time, instead of wine, she brewed a pot of strong coffee.

She wouldn’t be doing any more sleeping that night, obviously.

She paced while waiting for the coffee to be ready, buoyed by the delicious scent of it, comforted by the oh-so-ordinary sounds of the process.

When Susannah’s cup was filled and she’d reseated herself at the table, with the notebooks before her, Nico jumped into her lap. He was in bodyguard mode, apparently.

If it hadn’t been the middle of the night, she reflected, still agitated by the mental residue of the nightmare, she would have gone directly to the hospital and demanded to see Becky.

She’d be turned away at such an hour, naturally, and besides, she could neither take Ellie along with her nor leave her behind, alone in the house.

All of which boiled down to the fact that, for now anyway, she was stuck.

She was stroking Nico and brooding between sips of very hot coffee when her phone, which she’d left on the table earlier, made a familiar ping sound.

Curious, and frowning a little, but also grateful for the distraction, Susannah pulled the phone closer and squinted at the screen.

A text message.

From Ian McKenzie.

Say what? By then, it was after two in the morning. Why was he sending texts at that hour?

Susannah tapped at the screen with her index finger, and the message popped up.

Hi, Susannah. Ian here. I hope this doesn’t wake you up. No sense in both of us losing sleep.

She paused, biting her lower lip and considering her options.

Finally, out of curiosity—and, yes, a touch of excitement—she replied. No problem. I can’t sleep, so I’m sitting in my kitchen, drinking coffee and waiting for the sun to come up. Why are you still awake?

It was then that she remembered that Ian’s ex-wife was back in town. The fact shouldn’t have mattered to her, since it was none of her business, but matter it did.

Why can’t you sleep? Ian responded.

I asked you first , Susannah replied.

A laughing emoji appeared on Ian’s side of the screen. You’re right, you did. I can’t sleep because of some family stuff—and because, ever since we first met, I’ve been wanting to ask you out. On a real date, sans kids.

Susannah felt a faint thrill that eased the aftereffects of the nightmare considerably. Sounds good , she answered. What kind of date did you have in mind?

Dinner in Flagstaff?

For the briefest fraction of a moment, Susannah wanted to confide in Ian, tell him the particulars of Becky’s situation, show him the notebooks, ask for his insights on the nightmare that had made a good night’s sleep impossible.

But, no. She barely knew Ian and, besides, her problems weren’t his burden to bear.

Dinner in Flagstaff sounds like fun , she tapped in, after a delay, probably coming off as a lot more light-hearted than she actually was. When?

Ian: Next Saturday? I’ll be on-duty Tuesday through Friday.

Next Saturday it is , Susannah wrote back. Fancy or casual?

Which one would you prefer? I’m flexible.

A blush warmed Susannah’s face, and her heart was beating a little faster. The residue of the nightmare was almost gone. Casual , she answered. I left all my fancy dresses behind in Chicago. But what about the kids? I’m new in town, and I don’t know anyone I’d feel comfortable leaving Ellie with.

Ian: I know someone you can definitely trust. Her name is Erma Carlson and she’s great with kids. She looks after the twins when I’m working, and her husband—you met him when he came to get Tim Boyd’s horse after the accident—takes care of the critters.

Susannah: Okay. I’d like to meet Erma first, though.

Not a problem.

How is Tim doing? Susannah remembered to ask. She’d forgotten to call the hospital to get an update on the injured boy’s condition, and that made her feel mildly guilty, though she’d had a lot on her plate ever since she’d arrived in Copper Ridge.

He’s recovering , Ian wrote. It’s going to be a long haul, since he’s pretty banged up, but the prognosis is good. Tim’s a tough kid and he’ll be back in the saddle in no time.

Susannah repressed an urge to ask about Ian’s ex-wife and why her arrival had stirred up such a fuss in town earlier. It didn’t seem likely that a reconciliation was in progress, given that he’d just invited Susannah on a date, but you never know. Maybe Ian McKenzie was a player.

Go back to sleep , he texted, when she didn’t respond to his last message right away. Tomorrow’s another day.

Susannah responded with a smile emoji and a thumbs-up.

Technically, it was already tomorrow.

And there was no telling what it would bring.